Five Modes of Documentary Representation

The Interactive Mode of Documentary

Table of Contents

1) The Interactive Mode of Documentary Representation

2) Cinéma Vérité3) Ethical Questions

Interactive Mode

Interactive documentary … arose from the … desire to make the filmmaker's perspective more evident. Interview styles and inter-ventionalist tactics arose, allowing the film maker to participate more actively in present events. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 33

Interactive Mode

• The prominence of filmmaker’s presence

• Interaction with people through interviews

• People express their opinions and the filmmaker juxtapose them with contrary opinions and combine with filmed images or/and archival footage.

Interactive Mode

• Documentary as oral history

• The viewer as a witness to the historical world as presented by one who inhabits it

Interactive Mode

• Medium shots of interviewees• Long takes• Synchronous sound recording• (Inter-cutting interviews with recorded im

ages, newsreel or/and archival footage)

Interactive Mode

• Jean Rouch and Cinéma Vérité

• Anthropologist, filmmaker, civil engineer and explorer (1917-2004)

Cinéma Vérité

• Civil engineer turned ethnographer.

• Recording rites, rituals and communities in West Africa, Niger and Cote D’Ivoire

Cinéma Vérité

• Cronique d’un ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1960)

• Ground-breaking documentary with Edgar Morin

Cinéma Vérité• Two women sent to streets in Paris to intervi

ew passersby• Starting with a simple question, ‘Are you ha

ppy, sir?’, the interviews delve into the lives of the interviewees.

• Marceline, a Holocaust survivor; Angelo, who works in a Renault factory; Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast; and Mari-Lou, a young, beautiful and depressed Italian immigrant

Cinéma Vérité

• As the film progresses, the light opening scenes give way to intimate revelations and hotly contested political arguments.

• To use the camera as their tool and the film-making process as a means to explore their subject's preoccupations

Cinéma Vérité

• Marcel Ophüls, Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbi (1988)

• A documentary of the prozess against Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, and about his life after the war.

Cinéma Vérité• Ophuls’ sarcastic, scepti

cal and aggressive interviews with dozens of people - mainly Barbie’s enablers and apologists.

• Interviews reveal how Barbie was useful to US intelligence and South American dictators - escape from France

Cinéma Vérité

• Barbie’s anti-communism a handy excuse for his being able to remain in Bolivia till his extradition in 1987 - remaining in safe haven

• Barbie’s trial in Lyon proves Ophuls’s point - the verdict to Barbie’s crime

Cinéma Vérité

• Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985)• 9 1/2 hour documentary of the Holocaust witho

ut using a single frame of archive footage. • Interviews with survivors, witnesses, and ex-Na

zis• Shoah in Poland Part II

Ethical Questions

• How genuine are reactions shown by an interviewée? Does interaction between a film maker and his subject always bring out truth?

Ethical Questions• The manners in which the filmmaker present

s the interviews:• The ways in which filmmaker prompts the int

erviewée; • The filmmaker as provocateur; • Whether the filmmaker allows interviewées t

o put their case fully or not; • The manners the filmmaker edits the intervie

ws for his documentary.• ARE INTERVIEWS CARRIED OUT FAIRLY?

Ethical Questions

• Michael Moore, Roger and Me (1990)

• About the negative economic impact of General Motors COE, Roger Smith‘s summary action of closing several auto plants in Flint, Michigan, costing 40,000 people their jobs.

Ethical Questions

• Yawning gap between the rich and the poor; the disintegration of a one-time prosperous community

• Criticisms - Moore did talk to Roger Smith but the footage was not included in the film

Ethical Questions

• The eviction at the end of the film took place on the day different from Smith’s speech.

• Manipulation and tampering facts and interviews

• Satire; scepticism; social comment